Mozilla releases Firefox 19 stable with built-in PDF viewer

Mozilla has published the latest stable release of Firefox 19 for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. The update is rather short on new features, but it does include a built-in PDF viewer that will eliminate the need for third-party plugins such as Adobe’s Reader, which is often a source for security vulnerabilities. The PDF viewer is based on the Mozilla-supported HTML5 project PDF.js.

The PDF.js JavaScript library converts PDF files into HTML5 and has been available in Firefox for a while, but you had to manually enable it. The feature was switched on by default for the first time in the Firefox 18 beta.

The viewer itself can run on PCs, tablets and mobiles, although it was not included in the accompanying Firefox for Android update. Users only need to upgrade their Firefox browser and open a PDF to take advantage of it.

Other changes include a fix for a couple of bugs that affected launch time, a new browser debugger tool for add-on and browser developers, an experimental remote web console for connecting to Firefox on Android or Firefox OS, and a handful of new CSS implementations and improvements.

On the mobile side Firefox 19 for Android introduced theme support, additional ARMv6 support, and lowers the minimum requirements to a 600MHz processor and 512MB of RAM. The browser now runs on over 15 million devices, including the LG Optimus One, T-Mobile myTouch 3G slide, HTC Wildfire S and ZTE R750.

The full change log for both releases have been republished below for your convenience.

Firefox 19

NEW: Built-in PDF viewer.

CHANGED: Canvas elements can export their content as an image blob using canvas.toBlob().